thank you very much edge connection for having me and thank you to all of you for getting up extra early today I'm going to share my personal journey to success with you but I have to throw a disclaimer in there because my journey includes the words spanks crotch and g-string so for the men in the room brace yourselves about 15 years ago I remember I was sitting in a convention I was a fact sales rep and with the company I worked for zdenka I was there because I was one of the top sales reps in
the country and at that point in my life I had always wanted to be a lawyer but I basically failed the lsat I'm not a good test taker so I found myself after that driving to disney world and trying out to be goofy with my college degree making my family very very proud and unfortunately you have to be 58 to be goofy and I'm 56 so they made me a chipmunk and that didn't work out so there I was selling fax machines door-to-door sitting at this convention and this larger-than-life speaker got up on stage and
he said I'm going to prove to you today in four words that there is no such thing as a bad idea and he continued on to go Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle so I never in my wildest dreams could have imagined sitting there there five years later I would come up with an invention and be able to prove to the world in two words that there was no such thing as a bad idea and that is footless pantyhose it all started with my own but I did not like the way that it looked in white pants
so just like so many women out there we struggle on what to wear under things there are traditional shapers that were too thick and left lines and bulges there was underwear that leaves a panty line and then along came the thong which still completely confuses me because all that did was put under where exactly where we had been trying to get it out of so I decided to take matters into my own hands and I cut the feet out of control top pantyhose through the monitor my white pants looked fabulous felt great but they rolled
up my legs all night and at the end of that night I went to a party in buckhead I said to myself I have got to figure out a way to create this so that it stays down on the leg I didn't know what to do I like I'd mentioned I'd never taken a business class before i was working selling fax machines during the day i ended up getting on the internet and looking up hosiery mills and i went to a website called thomasnet.com where i found a list of all US manufacturers and I literally
went down the list finding hosier Ian shapewear and started calling each one of them on the phone well I did this for about six to eight months and everybody said the same thing which was basically no I believed in my product I still wanted to get it made so I started going to all the local craft stores here in Atlanta and went to michaels i went to hancock fabric and i started making homemade versions of my idea buying little stretchy elastic lace paper clipping them sewing them to the ends of the pantyhose I needed it
to stop just below the knee because that way it was invisible on your thigh and you got all the great shaping under your pants at the same time that I'm trying to get this made at the manufacturers I decide you know what I will leave him this idea I want to patent it so I ended up calling I went on the internet and I looked up at Martin Hubble three a rated law firms here in Atlanta I called them on the phone I said I'd like to make an appointment I took my lucky red backpack
and I went to each one of the calls and the first one that I went to later admitted to me that he thought my idea was so bad that he thought I had been sent by candid camera so you can imagine i'm presenting to him my footless pantyhose and telling him how i'm going to change the world one woman at a time and he is looking around the room during my entire presentation apparently for the hidden camera and they all quoted me between three and five thousand dollars to patent my idea and I had five
thousand dollars total in my savings to do this idea so I decided to write my own patent i went to barnes & noble on peachtree drive and i bought a book called patents and trademarks and i started writing my own patent at the same time that I'm writing it I'm still determined to get it made so I take a week off of work and drive around North Carolina and go in person to all the manufacturers that had been telling me no thanks on the phone so there I went got my lucky red backpack drove up
to North Carolina went from manufacturer to manufacturer and I would hear the same three questions every time which was and you are and i would say Sara Blakely and they'd say and you're with I'd say Sara Blakely and they go and you're financially backed by and I've got Sara Blakely and it goes so nice to meet you good luck with your idea and walk me to the door and it was about two to three weeks after I did that road show where everyone told me no again in person that I got a phone call from
a manufacturer in charlotte north carolina and he said quote sarah i have decided to help make your crazy idea and when i asked him why he had the change of heart he simply said i have two daughters lucky for me ran it by his daughters they said dad it's a brilliant idea you got to help this girl make it and that set me on my way of trying to get at me now as a consumer it had never dawned on me that men were the ones making all of our undergarments but it kind of dawned
on me that maybe that's why they've been so uncomfortable for so long because the the people making them were not spending all day in them and if they were they certainly weren't admitting it so it caused some challenges in the beginning because everyone that i was talking to was a man and i'm trying to explain no it's not just about being footless it's about right here it's making things look better and smoother and no panty lines well through the process I learned three very interesting things that stood out to me as a consumer one was
the industry had been taking an average waistband size between a small and an extra large and putting that same waistband size on every single product in order to cut costs in production so I immediately said nope that does not make sense that's why we're cutting our waistbands that's why we can't breathe so with Spanx if you're a small you had a small waistband if you're a large get a large way span it fits and makes the garment stay and work with the woman's body much better the second thing was the way that they did the
sizing was very interesting to me they have plastic forms and they would say this is plastic form small this is plastic for medium large and etc and they would make the garment and then put it on the plastic form and they would all stand back with their clipboards and go yep that's a medium and I would measure them and say ask her how she feels so I remember very quickly I'm going to test all of my Spanx products on women I test them on my mom my grandmother my friends and I have them where the
products and we still do this we have a lot of women at work at spanks they wear the products the men it spanks their wives wear it and now the men at Spanx also will wear the products and they're very honest we get feedback over time we don't just put it on a form and say it fit it stays and the last thing was just overall the yarns and the way that the machines were working I found that it you know really took a lot of technical time to make the fit and the product stay
and you want more compression in certain areas and not so much in the other and the industry had kind of just been making things all one compression which didn't necessarily work as well with the woman's body so I took all this in I'm still trying to get my product patented I call up the lawyer that laughed and thought i was on candid camera I said I've basically made the garment will you please please help me write the claims I've written my entire patent I had my mom who's an artist do the sketch that's in the
patent that's still on the US patent and trademark offices website and she she actually sketched it in our living room at home I went home for a weekend and I was the model I stood there in the product and that's what we did for that so I had done basically everything I could except for the claims which is when you have the real legal need to write the claims portion of a patent I ended up calling him he said Sarah I still don't get this idea but you're so passionate about it for seven hundred dollars
I'll do it over a weekend I said great so he spent the weekend doing it and on that Monday he called me and he said I just need to speak to the person at the manufacturer that you've been closely working with so I can find out exactly what the technical aspects are of this garment I said no problem that's Ted so Ted and I had been spending a lot of time working together for the past year I'd been driving up there at night and on the weekend trying to get the prototype just right well I
gotta tell you Ted was very southern I mean when I say southern I mean real southern so we get Ted on the phone I introduced we're doing a three-way call I said Ted this is my attorney can you please tell us exactly what's in the Spanx garment and he said yeah there's seventy percent nylon and thirty percent lacquer okay thanks Ted so my attorney and I are taking notes furiously I thank everybody we hang up the phone and the night before I'm going to submit my patent to the US Patent and Trademark Office I can't
sleep I remember sitting up thinking how does this product have lacquer in it so the next morning I call Ted and I said Ted can you please spell lacquer and he said sure ly c ra oh my god like rough okay Thank You Ted so I called my attorney I said get on your computer and hit all change on lacquer it's like rough and he started laughing so hard he goes there do you know how fast you would have gotten a patent trying to make pantyhose out of paint thinner so i went online and i
trademarked the word Spanx ah at USPTO dot govt and it cost me three hundred dollars on my credit card and then i also incorporated online at incorporate calm and i put my credit card in and that was one hundred and fifty dollars and the word spanks is interesting it came to me after thinking of really bad names for about a year I knew I wanted my product to have a fabulous name I just didn't know what it was and sitting in traffic in Atlanta I remember the word Spanx came to me across the windshield and
I literally pulled off the side of the road wrote it down on a piece of paper and I knew it was it I went home that night and I actually got in line and trademarked it at the very last minute I changed the ks to an X because I had done research and knew that made up words do better for products than real words do and they're also a lot easier to trademark now how did the words things come to me a lot of people ask after many many bad names running through my head one
day I decided okay kodak and coca-cola are two of the most recognized names in the world what do they have in common they both have a strong case sound to them and someone told me that the man who came up with the name kodak it's a made-up word and he actually took the cake because he liked the sound of it and put it at the beginning in the end of the word and played with letters in the alphabet i also have friends that do stand-up comedy and it's weird trade secret among comedians that the K
sound will make your audience laughs so I put all that together and I decided the case sound was good luck and the minute I thought that the word Spanx came to me and I knew it was right as far as the packaging goes what was I going to do I knew I needed to do something different I am a consumer everyone is a consumer of an idea they come up with you know what you like and don't like in the space that you've been buying and for me I go into the hose reshape or department
and it's a sea of beige and gray every package looked the same it was the same half-naked woman that had been photographed on every package for the last 20 years and you had to read the fine print in the upper left hand corner to figure out what was going on so I knew that I wanted my package to be bold be different if I got that chance for shelf space it needed to stand out and say I'm new on different check me out I had no money to advertise so I chose red which was extremely
unconventional no one had ever done read in the Hosier eeyore shapewear space and I did something no one had ever done either I put three cartoon illustrated looking women on the cover and the three women were very different looking and no one had ever done that either it had always been photography on the front of the package I worked on this package at night and on the weekends at my friend's computer for about three months and when I got it just right just how I wanted it to be and I didn't have any guidance I
just thought I want it to be something pretty that I would want to buy kind of want this to feel like a present to myself instead of a commodity I'm dreading to buy I ended up taking it putting it down in my apartment and saying it's perfect but what if there's supposed to be something on here for legal reasons that I don't know about so I went to bloomingdales and a few different stores and I bought 10 different pairs of pantyhose and I came back to my apartment and I put every single pair on the
floor and I remember looking and if the same thing was on all 10 I remember thinking it to be legal so I added it then one side of my packaging the prototype I was ready to go I had my name I called neiman marcus and the Neiman Marcus here in Atlanta kind of laughed and said well Sarah there is a buying office and it's in Dallas so why don't you call that number so i called the dallas neiman marcus and ask for the buyer and said I'm Sara Blakely I invented a product that's going to
change the way women wear clothes if you give me 10 minutes of your time I will fly there and show you and she said if you're willing to fly here i will give you 10 minutes I jumped on a plane and despite the pleas of my friends I took my lucky red backpack from college my friend said please Sara you cannot go to the Neiman Marcus headquarters with that old red backpack anything by a Prada bag return it the next day if you need to do something I took a really deep breath and I remember
thinking this is my lucky red backpack I have to bring it so I jumped on the plane and off I went and I'm sitting in front of the most impeccably dressed woman I mean even her pen was fabulous and I was shaking I had my footless Spanx in a ziploc bag from my kitchen and I had a color copy of the packaging I had created on my friends computer halfway through my presentation about five minutes into it I don't know if it was nerves or just no shame or this was my shot I just took
a deep breath and said you know what you need to come to the bathroom with me she kind of will excuse me I said just please come to the bathroom with you art with me i'm gonna show you what my product can do and she followed me into the bathroom and sure enough i did my own before and after for her and instantly she got it and instantly she said Sara this is brilliant I'm gonna try it in seven of our stores I was beyond excited I got in the rental car and on my way
to the airport the first call I made was to the manufacturer and the mill owner in charlotte north carolina and i said Sam Sam it's Sarah I need more he said excuse me I said I more spanks I just got off with Neiman Marcus and they want to order and we have to ship it to seven stores dead silence I said Sam are you there because sarah i had i have to admit i thought you were gonna give these away as christmas gifts and presents for the next five years what do you mean meme and
marcus wants it I think name is just placed a big order and I need more and he said well okay congratulations let me patch you through to Ted so Ted picks up the phone I said Ted Ted it's Sarah I need more spanks and he said well that's great but what's she gonna do about the crotches excuse me don't they come with crotches he said well yeah but we only got two crotch machines and they're being used by somebody else okay let me get this straight I just landed Neiman Marcus and I have no crotches
I don't know where to go for a crotch I looked in the yellow pages under crotch it's not there so then I found out that there's a fancy word for crotch which is gusset which helped my search and I was on the phone and my roommate at the time would laugh because we would have these FedEx packages arrive every day from all over the world and she'd come home she was a teacher she'd come home and go got another crotch in the mail and lucky for me the company i ended up using was right down
the road in norcross georgia and they to this day provide us with our gussets and just to make the story even that much more unbelievable the man that saved the day was an 80 year old man by the name of Jean Bobo kind of a legend in the business he said Sarah I got your crotches for you they'll be there in time for the Neiman Marcus order and I was able to ship to the seven stores well I immediately called every friend I ever remotely had in those seven cities and said hi it's Sara do
you remember me we sat next to each other in fourth grade um can you go to the store and say you're looking for something called spanks and you've been wanting at your whole life and i'll send you a check well just as I was running out of money and friends Oprah called I had sent a gift basket of my very first batch of prototypes to the oprah winfrey show and I get the call that Oprah has chosen Spanx as her favorite product of the year you can imagine for an entrepreneur with no money I'm sitting
in my apartment that's a call of a lifetime I was beyond thrilled they said Sarah in two weeks Oprah's going to hold up Spanx she doesn't normally have people on the show because it's all about product but she loves what you're doing you you've broken to a two billion dollar male-dominated industry with no experience and no money we want to show a little clip about what you're doing so we're going to fly down and film you I said great so they all showed up at my apartment and there were about 10 of them they were
so impressive clipboards video cameras big lighting and they said Sarah on the plane we decided that we want to film you in your headquarters I said you're here it kind of looked at each other and went oh ok ok well we also decided on the plane that we want to film you having a staff meeting hold on a minute I called Connie that I'd met at mailboxes Exedra I said Connie it's Sarah can you be at my apartment in five minutes and look like you work for me she said I'm on my way and I
also called all my friends who left their jobs and came over and we sat in a circle on the floor of my apartment and that was my staff meeting on the oprah winfrey show so one day you wake up and you're an inventor and then all of a sudden another day you wake up and you're a company that's a different feeling I remember it very well my only employee at the time was my boyfriend who was a healthcare consultant he was watching me stay up all night shipping pantyhose around the world he said you need
help he left his job then my second employee was a friend of a friend who heard I needed an assistant because I couldn't manage my scheduling and flights and booking this and going and doing appearances to try to spread the word and all that was going on in the company so she came on board and after two weeks of being my assistant I said do you want to be my head of product development she said sure and she still is and the third one was a friend that I went to walk to get a bagel
with and she said I've tried your prototype it's amazing i love it she told me the whole walk there and the whole walk back why she loved it I said do you want to be my head of PR and she did and I'm about you know a month into the business Dave and I mostly we were at two cardboard tables at the back room of my apartment it was a two bedroom apartment and then the phone would always ring and and we would say hello this is Spanx and they would say I need to speak
to shipping and handling we go please hold by transfer you I literally ran the business out of my apartment for a year and a half and a few months in of course what's the next thing that we decide to do I look at my team my robust team of three and said I'm going to Europe gonna bring Spanx overseas so I grabbed my lucky red backpack jumped on a plane cold called Harrods Harvey Nicks and selfridges and I got a chance to be on the BBC which is basically the US CNN and the gentleman that
was interviewing me you know million people no pressure Sarah he starts out and goes mm so Sarah tell us what Spanx can do for women in the UK I said well it's all about the fanny it's smooth Annie it lifts and separates your fanny and this man lost oh the color in his face and I had no idea but apparently Fanny means vagina in England Oh obviously I had to call back to our team and say our international expansion is off to a great start and from there it's space is now 10 years old we
just had our 10-year anniversary so much has happened in the 10 years we had a company meeting and I said at the meeting 10 years ago no one had ever heard of an ipod people were not using BlackBerry's the Cardassians were in fifth grade spanx went from one to over 100 employees we launched from just one footless pantyhose now we're in swim we've created bras that are amazing they're called Broly lujah you haven't tried it i hope you will it's become my favorite product and men's we've done so many things with Spanx and it has
exceed truly my wildest dreams I never could have imagined all that had come from this when I could afford to hire my weaknesses I did early on of a fabulous team and a great CEO she runs the day-to-day anyone who knows and has started a business has had to be every department in the beginning and you learned very quickly not good at this I really like this and when you can afford to do it delegate it's a huge gift to yourself and to your company's success but the thing that I'm most proud of over the
last 10 years is that Spanx has given over 10 million dollars to help women more than just their rears so and we've done it in many different ways and one of them was obviously giving and wanting to support the edge connection it's a fabulous organization and in doing that we've helped women with going to college with their own entrepreneurial businesses and the thing I like the most about it that's the most special to me is that every woman we help gets her very own lucky red backpack so it's my opportunity to pay it forward and
thank you so much for letting me be here today and speak to you I think we have a coupon for each one of you so if you go to Spanx calm and you have to spell it right or you're going to get a real treat my mom sent her whole luncheon at to the wrong website when I first started out so SP a and X and there's twenty five dollars off any of our garments and a lot of things on Spanx com or thirty dollars so you're basically getting to try something for free if you've
never tried it before and your woman I suggest the power panties which is also called the in power line it's a little shape or short that will take you through the whole spring and summer and guys we have not forgotten about you we have reinvented and redesigned the man's undershirt our thought there was not so much shaping shaping shaping but how can we make it better the man's undershirt is than the exact same for a hundred years nobody's paid any attention to it it's boxy and bulky under styles and sweaters and dress shirts so it's
more tapered in its more streamlined it's got its cotton so it looks and acts just like your regular undershirt but it's got a little bit of secret power going on around the the waist area which is also giving men a lot of great lower back support so check it out thanks calm thank you so much for having me here today and good luck with your journeys to success
